Loftwings and Demons

Sometimes horror is intentional, and sometimes things are horror without meaning to be.

Legend of Zelda has both. Though as the intentional horror has been softened in the newer iterations of the game, the unintentional horror seems to have grown in sharp relief.

Let me explain.

In older Legend of Zelda games, bokoblins, bulblins, moblins, and other commonly encountered foes were part of a military force. This is not to say they couldn't be interpreted in a sympathetic light, just that they are predominately a fighting force.

However, in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, they could literally just be...a farmer (BOTW bokoblins)...literally just someone taking a nap (some of the moblins)...some guy picking berries (the TOTK bokoblins have such cute little packs for this 🥺)...a random traveller who's just minding their business until you come along (the Yiga). And yes, while all of them will pre-emptively attack you, it's hard for me not to interpret that either:

1. In a watsonian fashion as a defensive strategy of a regular person that is simply doing their best to defend themselves in a hostile world.

2. In a doylist fashion as not having to make significant changes to the gameplay mechanics or to the basic good vs evil narrative structure of the story.

And then there's the additional horror of Link using monster parts in his potions. Some poor farmer or berry picker's guts could be in that stamina potion. Link performed highway robbery on that poor Yiga civilian.

Was reading parts of Ascent recently as I worked on fixing the formatting of the story for my website.  Reminds me how much fun I had when I was writing Ghirahim and Orynx interacting. Orynx is still one of my favorite OC's (original characters) to have written.  He might also be the one with the most characterization, though I always have fun with characterization when writing my OCs.

While I love writing canon characters and expanding their backstories, I often introduce OCs to fulfill roles that no canon character exists for, as well as to give the canon characters more relationships than they have in the canon. This was especially essential for Ghirahim, since he is the main character for my story and the only character in the canon he is positively aligned with, and who he would be expected to care much about, is Demise.

In my AU this presented a particular problem, since Hylia has already killed Demise before the events of the story take place. Additionally, I wanted Ghirahim to have more of a leadership role among the demons, since in the game he seems to be the one who presents the most obstacle to Link, and the one who has the more menacing air to him for much of the game due to the extremely poor design choice made for Demise's 'monster' forms. I felt it would be interesting to have Ghirahim running things instead since he seemed to be doing that for most of the game anyway.

The Ghirahim in my story has never even met Demise, at any rate. And I wanted him to be a more complex character than the Ghirahim in the game, while still keeping a lot of the mannerisms and personality traits of the original character.

So I made a bunch of demon OCs he could talk to and interact with. Orynx is Ghirahim's guard, but he's also something of an unofficial advisor to Ghirahim, though Ghirahim doesn't necessarily always take his advice. I gave Orynx a pretty detailed backstory, some of which I've already revealed in the story.

And though the Ghirahim of my story has no relationship to Demise at all and never even met him, I decided that there should be some character who was obsessed with Demise, so I made another character who I called Lord Terrin, who was once Demise's guard, and who's absolutely bent on getting revenge for his death.

Anyway, sometime I really want to continue this story. I always had a lot of fun with its combination of action and character interaction, as well as its extensive backstory. Skyward Sword is my favorite Legend of Zelda game, though I've been a fan of the series since Ocarina of Time (the first Zelda game I played).

Went through hyrule castle and fought the final boss.  Who killed me because I wasn't prepared, haha.  I think I should collect more stuff before I try to fight him again.

A Link to the Past is special to me because of the way it masterfully implies a story, as well a being just an incredibly well-designed and challenging game. It makes you think, but most of the complexity comes from the incongruity of the images, such as Link's transformation in the Dark World, and the ambiguity and implications of the things the many characters Link encounters say.